


Dark Matter

by RurouniHime



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alpha Steve Rogers, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Baggage, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Omega Tony Stark, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Phil Coulson, Protective Tony Stark, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Superhusbands, briefly deserumed Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:40:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24359725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: A mission goes wrong with troubling consequences for Steve. (Based in the world of sabrecmc's Celestial Navigation and its sequel Orbital Mechanics)
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 50
Kudos: 419





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabrecmc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrecmc/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Celestial Navigation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10720710) by [sabrecmc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrecmc/pseuds/sabrecmc). 



> **Thank you so much to stacking-matches for gently correcting my misleading tag of body dysphoria. My apologies for the mistake. The correct tag for this story is Body Dysmorphic Disorder**
> 
> This lives in the wonderful world of sabrecmc's Celestial Navigation and its in-progress sequel Orbital Mechanics. It started as an Ask on tumblr, which then became a "you should write it" which then became... this. I humbly thank sabre for being so lovely and generous, letting me work in this universe.
> 
> It takes sometime after Tony is kidnapped, gets the arc reactor, and comes home, and SHOULD NOT be considered part of sabre's canon (unless sabre says so). This is me ficcing a fic, riffing on an idea of this Steve. There are SPOILERS for sabre's series, if you haven't read it.

The bathroom light was too bright, white fluorescent that buzzed loudly enough to rattle in his skull. No one came to this throwback of a restroom tucked into a corridor made less important by last year’s additions, so Steve braced his hands here. Leaned over this sink, and tried not to vomit.

_Shouldn’t have looked in the mirror._

_Sink’s a lot closer than it should be._

The light buzzed. He shook. He hadn’t shaken like this in years—in decades, and it wasn’t actually because of... because of what had happened. He wished it were.

Not naming it. Not ready to name it. He’d spent too damned long living this damned travesty and now, now he was—

A faint tap on the door. Very faint. He never would have heard it if the water was still on and maybe it wasn’t that faint at all, come to think of it, the left side was his bad side, had always been his bad side, damn it, _damn_ it, he’d completely forgotten about that.

“Captain Rogers?” Coulson. Then, softer, “Steve.”

“In a minute,” he called, glad of his voice for sounding normal at least, his throat for not seizing, his lungs for cooperating. This body had rarely ever worked together like this. This felt like an alien’s body, none of this was his anymore and he _did not want it._

There had been a time when he couldn’t get used to the other body either, when it had made him shudder like a dried snakeskin, when he looked in the mirror and nearly jumped backward at what he saw. Now the very idea made hysteria bubble up like seltzer in his throat.

To his credit, Coulson didn’t knock again. Steve pictured him standing guard in the dim little corridor, that faint smile softening his eyes—approachable until you actually tried to approach him and then you found out if he really was happy to see you—gently but firmly turning SHIELD employees aside with a nod on down the hallway. 

It should have been funny. It should have made Steve laugh. For all the fizzing inside him, Steve felt like he’d never laugh again.

This body used to laugh. It used to not know better, that things could and would one day be different. It was glad of what it had been given, it never took itself for granted, and amidst the sickness and sadness and hunger, and the death of the one person he’d always thought he couldn’t live without, this tiny, fragile body had found joy where it could. It had smiled and it had laughed, and none of that had been a lie.

“God, you’re pathetic.” That was the truth, and he wasn’t about to argue. He wasn’t _dead,_ for crying out loud, and he wasn’t frozen in another block of ice either. Life’s little gifts. He’d just been... well, whatever had happened to him. He was sure SHIELD would get back to him on that. Probably what Coulson wanted him for, out there in the hall, along with the chance to finally see the new and improved Captain America. 

Despite his new and _un_ improved hearing, he’d heard footsteps passing, far more often than usual for this area of the facility, and he knew why. They all wanted to see, everyone who had been on the mission, everyone who had heard. Rumlow no doubt was on the prowl through the halls, just looking for his chance to see Steve Rogers knocked down a peg or ten. To see what the great Alpha really was underneath. Steve wasn’t fool enough to think otherwise.

“Buck up,” he seethed through his teeth and glowered at his own reflection. It was insane, hearing that voice come out of this face again. As though the timbre of his voice, despite asthma atop pneumonia atop bronchitis, hadn’t always been exactly the same.

He’d tried not to think of Tony, and he’d failed miserably. Between staring at his thin, frail hands and down at his toothpick legs, his mind was filled with Tony, a flood uncontrollable, rushing into every cranny and fracture and socket. Tony. His Omega. His Tony. Tony’s eyes, lighting whenever Steve came into a room. Tony’s body, shivering and perfect, rising to his touch. Tony’s scent, blooming like petals just under Steve’s nose.

He looked at his hands again—better than seeing that face in the mirror—and thought about touching Tony now, with these fingers.

He snorted. That laugh of his was determined to get out, no matter how unfunny everything had become. 

He could imagine touching Tony, sure. What he was having trouble with was imagining Tony wanting him to.

 _Don’t be an idiot._ Steve sucked in a deep breath through his nose, a miscalculation that he nearly coughed right back out again. But he held it, stubborn, and the tightness gradually faded. _Don’t be such a pathetic fool. He loves you. He’s proven that, hasn’t he? What more does he have to do for you?_

Nothing, Steve had thought. He hadn’t doubted, not really, not since that dinner at the Stark mansion, that hell on wheels of tempered sniping at Tony’s expense and Steve’s skyrocketing adrenaline, when the world had finally, truly opened for him, this new time and place where he’d been floating unanchored for so long, not really a part of anything, not until Tony folded Steve properly up in his life and forced the piton home in the rocks. Made Steve realize he’d already been putting down roots for weeks, trying to cultivate them and shying away because this wasn’t a real mating, this was an arrangement, the lesser of two evils for two people whom life had thrown in front of the bus. This hadn’t been his, not really. Tony hadn’t loved him. Until suddenly he did, and it was, and everything was right in his face, and he’d gathered it up in his arms before he could stop himself, and he’d come _home._

He wondered, fleetingly, how big of a chance he had to sneak out of this building, take his car, and just go. Away from SHIELD, away from DC. Away from Tony.

Even the thought hurt. He couldn’t leave Tony. He didn’t want Tony to see him like this, but if he tried to leave, to cut free of Tony Stark and disappear, he was pretty sure it would actually kill him. There were stories. Every kid in his neighborhood had heard them, bedtime tales of Alphas barred from their Omegas by time and circumstance, who wasted away and died because their bond was so true. He hadn’t thought of those stories in a long, long time. At first, they were trite, naive, far too narrowly focused and unaware of the vast and varied ugliness of the real world: who cared about Alphas pining to death when people died of hunger every day in the streets, when families were preyed upon for the way they worshipped their god, when a dictator in Europe was wholesale slaughtering entire societies? 

Steve had gone to war, then to the ice. After that, he had been the walking dead, and then... then he’d had Tony, _Tony,_ and no reason to think about fairytales.

Now his heart thudded too hard in his chest, pushing at blood that felt too thick. Now, he imagined leaving Tony behind, felt a razor-dark fissure open up inside him, and he wondered.

No one, least of all Rumlow, would believe he was an Alpha now. They’d consider the arrangement between he and Tony dissolved, just the same as whatever he’d been shot with had dissolved his muscle, his enhanced senses, his stamina. His worth would be downgraded once again to poking and prodding, endless blood tests to prove the same damn thing over and over because they just couldn’t believe what their machines were telling them. SHIELD was full of open-minded scientists, but what was Steve to them but an albeit amazing scientific anomaly, the only one of this kind? The only one who’d survived not just the change but the reversal of that change. They’d ask themselves, how could an Alpha like this keep an Omega who had signed on for something completely different?

He knew what was in his future. He’d lived it in the past, and human beings, for all their technological, medical, and societal advancement, hadn’t changed that much.

He’d been mistaken for, and harassed as, an Omega at least once a week before the serum, a misconception that he was bitterly ashamed to say he’d despised at the time. The year his mother had died, the same year he and Bucky had been evicted from their tenement, had been the worst. Nothing had gone right that year, and he was small and slight, sickly, but at least he’d been an _Alpha._ At least he’d had _that_ going for him, why had everyone else, save Bucky, refused to see?

He remembered the righteous indignation he’d mulishly nursed next to his heart for ages, and he thought of Tony, and he felt sick all over again.

The whole idea was a toxic cesspool, the sort of disservice Alphas could and did visit upon Omegas with extreme prejudice. He had come to terms with his self-important resentment back then. Knew he’d made mistakes. Knew he genuinely was not that person anymore. Hadn’t hated himself for it in what felt like lifetimes, and one mishap had torn it all down?

“No.” He slammed his fist on the sink’s edge. No chunks broke off, no porcelain cracked. The side of his hand hurt like blazes, and he thought of Tony again—always Tony—thought of Tony flipping off the universe behind his back where no one would know but him.

A flipped birdie had not stopped Tony from being married off, and a hand bruised on a stubborn sink would not give Steve back his height and heft. But the impotence of either gesture did not lessen the pain or the rage behind them. 

It still mattered.

Another light tap on the door. “If you need anything—”

“I’m coming out.” He didn’t want to. God, he didn’t want to. He wished he hadn’t said it. He could just stay in here, until this wore off or everyone forgot about him. Somehow. 

He realized with a sinking in his gut that he’d made a grave error choosing this bathroom. He’d been thinking of seclusion, but the tactician in him had been looking the other way: it was in the oldest part of the building, and the farthest from the exits. It had been hard enough walking the halls once, to get here. The stares, the whispers. The deafening silence. He honestly didn’t know if he’d survive the trip out without going crazy.

 _Tony. Think of Tony, and that’s all._ Since when had Rumlow mattered? Rumlow didn’t matter. None of them did. _Make it so nothing else matters, and nothing else will matter._

Tony was still Tony. Steve took a deep breath and let it out. Tony had chosen him, not because he was Alpha or huge or powerful or enhanced. He’d chosen Steve because he was Steve. Because he’d seen Tony, not an Omega, and he’d proven it. Big or small, Steve loved Tony, would do anything for Tony, including…

Steve’s exhalation caught in his throat. Including walk away if Tony asked him to.

_And if he asked you to stay?_

Oh hell, what could he possibly do for Tony like this?

“You can be the man he loves, you idiot.” Steve turned on the sink again and splashed his face, almost viciously, then toweled himself off and didn’t look in the mirror as he walked out of the bathroom.

Coulson came up off the wall the second Steve appeared. His gaze flicked down Steve’s body once and returned to his face. And that was all. The rush of fondness, of relief, that Steve felt pricked another hole in the blackness.

“Reports from medical.” Coulson handed the tablet over with frank efficiency. “They’ve asked you to come back for further study.”

Steve bit down on his tongue, tasted blood.

“I took the liberty of declining for you.”

And now Steve’s throat was heating, lurching shut, and it wasn’t asthma and he _wasn’t_ going to cry, not here and not in front of this man. He nodded a curt thanks and woke the tablet up.

Asthma, scoliosis, profound left-side hearing loss, impaired vision, and marginal function in his right kidney. As expected. It was like reading a book he’d memorized once and forgotten. At least there was nothing new. The word ALPHA hovered in his demographics block like an accusation. Like they’d expected that to have changed.

He rubbed his brow. Maybe he was reading into this, seeing things that weren’t there.

No. If Steve Rogers did nothing else, he trusted his instincts. Those had never changed.

Steve raised his head and took a deep breath. 

And lied. “I’d like to go home.”

He didn’t know where he truly wanted to go. Half of him refused to know who he _was_ anymore.

**

The drive was an ever-narrowing hell. Steve’s thoughts assailed like the stinging sleet of an ice storm, cutting into him no matter which way he turned. His chest hurt, the constant tightness of not enough air that chip-chip-chipped away at his stability. It was as though the stout tortoise shell he’d built inside his head had been torn from him along with the serum: there was no escaping the demolition of depression, no adrenaline to dig him out from under the weight, no endorphins to calmly slide home as his body worked to heal yet another perceived wound. Steve had never been completely in control of his PTSD, but the enhancement from the serum had helped, and being with Tony had done the rest. Now there was nothing, just a mind battered on all sides, knocked to its knees and unable to pick itself up before the next gust. 

By the time they turned down the winding, unpaved road to the house, gravel and forest detritus crackling under the car’s tires, Steve’s fingernails had bitten bloodily into his palms and his jaw ached from clenching.

All he could think was that he’d fought this battle already. He’d won it. It had been brutal and bloody, but it had been his victory. Now his mind was wailing, remembering each interminable step through the mire. He would not, could not fight this one again.

His insides were crying out. It was unfair, it was brutal to do this to Tony, without warning. But a frustrated, angry seed that had died ages ago and been resurrected with this body had its claws deep in him again, and it demanded to see what Tony would do.

Tony. His Tony, who loved him.

“Wait,” Steve croaked, heart suddenly in his throat, his muscles—such as they were—locking up like rigor. His hand tightened around the door handle inside the car, squeezing hard enough that he shook. He shouldn’t have done this to his husband. He should have called, he should have…

But it was too late: they were slowing to a stop outside the house. Tony was leaping down the steps, and Steve was opening the car door on automatic, every bone, every cell in his body pulling toward Tony in spite of himself, the wail changing to a terrifyingly hopeful pitch, and then he was standing as upright as he still could, and the sun was blistering and the air, full of pine and sage and clear spring mist, went thick and still.

Tony’s eyes widened, socked pools of deep brown ringed in white. All Steve could see in his mind’s eye was his own bent back, his stooped shoulders, his concave chest.

And then Tony wrapped himself around Steve, gripping him _so hard._

“Are you alright? What did they— Are you, tell me you’re okay.” The words ploughed together; Tony pressed his face into Steve’s throat and inhaled, rough, scenting him, then again, lengthy this time but just as deep. The arc of Tony’s throat was right there, and Steve gave up. Tony smelled so good, so… 

_Mine._

His fingers fisted in Tony’s shirt, feeling grime and grit and oil and cotton, or imagining he could still feel such detail. Tony’s heat. Tony’s heartbeat was gone, he couldn’t hear it anymore, just a telling, devastating silence, and Steve shook. 

His Omega.

“Tony.” He wasn’t going to beg. He didn’t even know what he would say. He wasn’t going to plead for this, color this in any way, he’d sworn it to himself over and over as the miles fell away beneath the car’s wheels, winding up the mountain. But he couldn’t keep silent: he had Tony in his arms, and everything felt horrifically, falsely fine, and he felt an absurd urge to laugh, and laugh hard.

“He’s in shock,” Coulson said.

Tony’s fingers dug into Steve’s back, too deep. “And you took him away from medical?”

“No,” Steve gasped, his lungs cinching right up, “no, I can’t—I—”

“Okay, okay,” Tony soothed, immediately contrite, soft in his ear. “Fuck, I’m an idiot. Okay, we won’t. We won’t, Steve, I swear it.”

He couldn’t breathe. His chest was suddenly so tight, like a belt squeezing around his lungs, and his throat burned as though he’d eaten something spicy. He clung to Tony, unable to let go, only to grip tighter and tighter, and thank God he had none of his usual strength because he’d be crushing Tony’s ribs into powder by now, but he couldn’t possibly do that anymore, could he, and that was when the laughter finally caught up to him.

Only there was no air. 

“Steve. _Steve.”_ He heard Tony saying his name, but it was lost in cotton. Another voice, also familiar, and then the world tilted a little and Tony’s words got frantic. Steve gasped and gasped, stretched out his hand and tried to say that he couldn’t breathe, but could only wheeze, and then plastic was between his lips.

“When I give you the dose, breathe it in deep and hold your breath, okay?” Coulson. “Steve?”

Steve nodded, desperate, and then there was a puff of air over his tongue, and he sucked it deep into his lungs and held. 

It was acrid and dry. The first try, he coughed it right back out. But the second try, he got hold of himself, kept it in. The world stopped swimming. He felt his heartbeat in his ears, thumping seconds like a clock. When he couldn’t hold it any longer, he exhaled, and this time it was Tony who held the little device, who gave him the necessary dose.

This one went smoothly.

“What is it,” Steve wheezed, his voice dull to his own ears. Somewhere in the mess, exhaustion had stalked up behind him. He clung to the curiosity even as it faded into the background. “An inhaler?”

“An anti-inflammatory, for your asthma,” Coulson said.

Tony stiffened against Steve’s side. Steve ignored it, by the razor edge of his will. He nodded, letting his head drop to his chest. All he could see now were his shoes. They were the same size as always. It wasn’t… It wasn’t so bad. He was here, in the mountains, at the house he shared with Tony, and that was all good. Promising. Normal. He inhaled as much as he dared, seeking the solace, the recognition of home. 

He could barely smell the fucking pine. Even that had been stolen from him.

They got him inside. The manner of it was pretty muddled, and at some point, Coulson left. Steve didn’t know when. He came to himself sitting on the edge of their bed, with Tony rifling through a plastic bag on the dresser nearest to the door. The clack and rattle of pill bottles reached Steve’s ears like a gunshot. He blinked down at his feet. His shoes were gone, only his socked toes curling and uncurling into the carpet. It was considerably darker outside now, twilight bathing the room in blues and pinks through the large window.

“How long have we been here?”

Tony turned at Steve’s croak. He didn’t say anything for a long moment, just looking at Steve in the dim light, then abandoned the pill bottles—so many damned pill bottles, look at them all—in the rows he’d been placing them in on the dresser. He crossed the room silently and lowered himself next to Steve on the bed. The smell of him was a shot to the gut. It should have permeated the room, but instead it flooded Steve wholly only when Tony got close enough—yet another sense that had taken a hit, he couldn’t even smell his own Omega now? Steve made a horrible sound and tipped against Tony, unable to stop. Tony’s throat was warm and soft, and fluttered against Steve’s nose as he swallowed.

The soldier in him shouted: _What the hell is the matter with you? This is not how we survive!_ And he was right. He was right. And it didn’t matter. Steve didn’t know how to be in this body anymore, how to move its limbs or slow its heart or work its lungs. Forget his shoes; the only thing familiar here was Tony, _Omega, mine,_ and Steve couldn’t get close enough.

It took him more than a moment to figure out that Tony was shushing him.

“…ay. It’s okay, Steve, babe, I’m here. I’m right here.”

An…echo. Of something. Something familiar, words Tony had spoken before. For the life of him, Steve couldn’t remember where.

“I,” Steve tried, wanting to ask. To ask something. He wanted… He wanted something Tony didn’t, because Tony was quieting him, pushing him back, soothing when he should have been doing the opposite, and it occurred to Steve what it was that he thought he wanted, but even that became muddled and confused, and for a second he thought he might throw up.

He just wanted to be close. That was all. He thought that was all.

He probably couldn’t even _do_ anything more, he thought scornfully, even if he did want to. Before the serum, he hadn’t exactly had much chance to sow his wild oats, as they called it, no idea how his body would behave in an intimate setting. No, there was no telling what this body could take, what new situations might be developing even as they sat here, what would fail on him next. What never had worked in the first place. He stared at the orange and white lines of bottles on the dresser, the medications Coulson must have explained to and then left with Tony, and was glad he hadn’t been aware enough to remember that conversation.

So many _pills._

As if reading his mind, Tony also looked at the bottles lining the dresser. Steve’s heart jumped, jumped again as he watched Tony’s jaw tighten, watched his eyes flick from bottle to bottle. Each one was another hole in Steve’s existence now: his headaches, his back, his kidney, his lungs, his heart—oh God, now he _and_ Tony had heart issues, that was just… just… And his anemia and the ringing in his ear and the arthritis starting up in his fingers, and it was all wrong, wrong, wrong.

“I’m not me,” he choked out. “I’m sorry. I’m so _sorry.”_

Tony took Steve’s face in his hands, gave him the smallest of shakes. It snatched Steve’s breath away, and he looked up into Tony’s eyes.

Up.

“Maybe you won’t hear me,” Tony said softly. His eyes tracked over Steve’s face, never stopping. “But you’re you. You smell like you. You feel like you.”

“How—”

 _“You do._ Steve. You are here. Everything about you is mine, is home to me, God, Steve, you got out of that car and everything just—went silent, do you even—” Tony fisted his hands, half lifted them but let them drop before he touched Steve. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Do you know how loud it is? When you’re gone? I can’t... The world is just deafening, and all I can do is think, and when you’re here, you make it all quiet again, and Steve, you’re doing it right now.”

“Tony?” His voice cracked. “I may need some quiet, too.”

Tony’s eyes darted between Steve’s. “Okay, come here, _God,_ come—”

He didn’t know what he expected when he dropped fully into bed. When Tony toppled onto it beside him. His body tried to do… something, but he couldn’t make sense of it, the mess in his head at total war with the tremble in his veins. Tony. Tony, there, skin to skin. The heat of his breath stole over Steve’s chest. Everything smelled overwhelmingly of them: the sheets and pillows, the mounded blankets and the oddly stitched quilt that lay on top of it all, the remnant of a slowly fading winter. The weight of it all was harsh and lush, equally beating at Steve’s nerves and soothing him, and he found himself gasping over and over, Tony asking in harried whispers _Do you need your, do you_ and Steve shaking his head, _No, no, just…_ until Tony pressed his face back against Steve’s throat and tangled them together. Pulled the blankets over them until it was all dark and still and theirs.

**

It was so damned quiet.

Mornings in the cabin had always been quiet. There was no traffic up here, no city sounds or flyovers with their ear-shattering engines. Just the breeze in the trees and the tinkle of the chimes on the veranda, the chitter and chirp of birds and small animals. Soothing.

Much less soothing not to hear anything at all.

Well. That wasn’t precisely true. He could hear Tony breathing, steady and soft beside his ear. And he could hear the chimes, the odd crystalline tink-tink every now and then. But he couldn’t tell if that was because there was no wind or because he just didn’t have the ears to tell the difference anymore.

The ceiling was the same, rich cedar with dark whorls and knots painting a maze through the wood. Steve had stared at it so often: awake to watch the rising light creep across the room, giving it back its color with every inch; blinking bleary-eyed as Tony snuffled sleepily against his shoulder, just barely overwarm; awake like a crack as his internal alarm went off, grounding himself in the pattern of the wood before finally sliding out of bed and readying to go to SHIELD. He’d never looked at it like this, desperate for aim, wondering when the color had gone so flat, when the tiniest striations had disappeared.

He’d asked Tony once if he ever thought they’d actually bench Captain America.

Oh, they’d benched him now, but good.

A new emptiness crept over him. How could there possibly be so many kinds of emptiness? Empty was empty; there was no need to quantify it, make it special. A void was still a void. Except, he realized, when you could catalogue exactly the shape of each hole.

He’d never noticed before, but now he felt dust tickling his throat, goose down from the pillows itching his nose. He clutched a handful of the sheet beneath him and lifted, wanting to feel the strain as the fabric went taut against his hip. Tony shifted at his side, letting out a small sigh, and Steve turned his head on the pillow to look. 

He was beautiful, as expected. His eyes moved behind their lids, a signal of dreams, and every breath flared Tony’s nostrils just a touch. A lock of hair, gone oily overnight, had fallen down over his forehead to shade one eye. His knees were tucked up, resting against Steve’s hip, and his hands held each other in a loose clasp a centimeter from Steve’s arm. The stunning, icy blue from the arc reactor in his chest cast a gentle glow over their skin. 

Tony’s head was next to Steve’s on the pillow, face tilted down toward Steve’s neck. Not on Steve’s shoulder. Because Tony was bigger than Steve now.

How could he possibly protect Tony with his body whittled down to this shrunken thing?

“Damn it,” he breathed. Tony could protect himself. Far better than Steve could, in fact. Hell, Steve hadn’t been able to stop his kidnapping, hadn’t stopped the heart injury that nearly ripped him out of Steve’s life. Steve had only been able to clean up the mess after. To dispense punishment. This could go into that basket: things he and Tony didn’t talk about. Tony never made any bones about it, never even hinted. But Steve couldn’t shake the sense that somewhere, somehow, Tony blamed him for not getting there in time. For not finding him.

So Tony had saved himself.

But Steve wanted to protect Tony, to shield him, to set himself between and make the space so Tony could be free. He had wanted it from the beginning. Most of all, he wanted to do nothing but be worthy of this ephemeral, amazing man, this Omega who rewrote existence with every motion, every word, and Steve would do whatever it took, again and again, because Tony was the searing center of the galaxy, the force forever tugging on Steve’s blood, gentling him into a new orbit, turning his feet and his weary heart homeward.

“You feeling okay?”

Steve jumped. Tony stared at him with fully woken brown eyes. The rest of him—hands, head, knees—hadn’t moved.

He nearly answered, nearly spat out the first thing that decided to come, whatever it was. Then he stopped, thought about it.

“I’m breathing.” He sounded so dull. Flat. He couldn’t make himself care. It was enough effort just getting anything out at all.

The truth was, he ached. His spine hurt from lying on his back all night. His knees felt old and rickety, even lax like this in bed, and there was a particular nettling pain in one hip, as though the area had gone to sleep and was just coming back to life. He shifted ruefully, trying to find a more comfortable position. In an instant, Tony’s arm was under his shoulders, his knees slipping beneath Steve’s to elevate his legs. Steve couldn’t stop the groan of relief as his lower back straightened out. Tony’s hand swept up and down his flank, from waist to armpit.

“Better?” Low and murmured into his neck. Steve’s skin tingled with the feel of it, Tony’s smell in his lungs and Tony’s body so close. He could scent Tony’s readiness creeping over them, the way his body was changing in arousal, readying for his Alpha. There was no push to it, no grasping tug; just Tony, near Steve. Just Tony, waking in another way.

And Steve wanted to. He _wanted._ Wanted to slide home into that heat. To hear the gasps, the half words familiar as his own, coming from Tony’s throat. To settle into the cradle of Tony’s legs, fit just like a key in a lock, flatten himself to Tony’s front, breathe Tony’s moans straight from the lips that voiced them.

But.

This _body._

He could feel every inch of it, or every missing inch. Nerve endings torn free, vibrating with each wheezy breath he drew into these tortured lungs. He felt spent, and sick. Nothing worked like it was supposed to. Nothing would. He remembered all of this, all, and how had he gotten so complacent, so used to the gifts he’d been given, that he couldn’t handle less than a day in his original form? Everything in him shied away from the weakness of it, the vulnerability, the understanding that he had no physical strength anymore. All he had now was internal strength to stand against all the world, all his enemies—to stand between them and Tony—and he knew it wasn’t enough. 

He couldn’t own this body. Today, this morning, some necessary part of him still refused.

“Steve?” 

How long had he been frozen? The cozy scent of arousal remained, but was muted. Less than it had been. Long enough for Tony to understand.

Some kind of wall had gone up, silent and sinister, while he’d looked the other way.

Steve swallowed. “I don’t think I can…”

_Be your Alpha in that way. Do what I want to do, to you, with you. Do what you need._

He mustered a prayer he didn’t feel. “Right now.”

Tony just stroked his temple with one thumb, and the motion sent soothing warmth through Steve’s veins, for the first time he could remember since the attack that had done this to him. “S’alright.”

It wasn’t. Steve let himself grimace, shake his head. Didn’t have the wherewithal to stop it. It wasn’t alright. Each time he thought it, it drove itself further home.

_Mine. Tony. Omega. **Please—**_

Tony caught his face in both hands, suddenly up and leaning over Steve on the bed. Steve stared at him, heart rabbiting in a way it never had with Tony. Uncertain. Unable to predict. Like prey. 

“It’s alright,” Tony repeated, slowly, enunciating. 

Steve’s dog tags (around Tony’s neck, how had he not noticed?) dangled between them, clinking almost inaudibly. 

Relief flowed over Steve. It was strange; he didn’t feel he should be relieved. The logician in him barked incredulous laughter. But it was Tony saying it. It was Tony holding him. Breathing at the same rate as he breathed. Coaxing his breaths deeper, his pulse slower. Wearing his tags, like always. The smell of Tony, of them, returned to him, as though the panic had been holding a cloth over his nose. He recoiled from it, from the future of what always followed when the two of them smelled like this. But it wasn’t right, was it? He, Steve, didn’t smell right, and so his part of this didn’t smell right, and Tony would never… never want…

“It’s alright,” Tony said again, right at his ear.

Steve’s eyes welled. The relief finally bulled through and had its way, muscling the rest aside, and Steve pressed his face into Tony’s neck and cried.

~tbc~


	2. Chapter 2

Week One was hard.

Should Steve have started over like that? He’d started over a few times in his life already, once when his mom died, then again after the serum. Again, after the plane and the ice, and waking in a world that couldn’t ever be his. He’d started again when… Tony.

He thought of it as Week One, anyway.

Waking up got better. Waking up by Tony’s side couldn’t be anything but good, on one level or another. Even tired and sore, confused because he’d had years since he woke up and didn’t immediately know exactly where he was—Even then, Tony. Tony’s breathing. Tony’s heat. Tony’s sleep-murmurs in the midst of some dream. 

Speaking of dreams.

Waking up from nightmares was not as pleasant. Steve’s head was a strange place. Nothing so straightforward as lining up to punch the Red Skull and discovering weak and scrawny arms, or racing to that cave in the desert only to find Tony still there, still chained to that car battery, instead of safe and sound at home with Rhodey, Tony sick and malnourished, collapsed on the dank and dusty floor, that damned sand everywhere, grinding in between Steve’s toes and filming his nose and between his damned _eyelids,_ blinking and blinking because all he could see was the blurred shape of Tony on the ground, not whether he was alive. No, these dreams were much simpler, much more archetypal. Steve couldn’t get air. He coughed and coughed, tried to speak and coughed instead, until his chest burned, until his vision paled, and he scrabbled through pocket after pocket looking for his inhaler, feeling it just out of reach, and then he started awake only to find himself still coughing, still needing that inhaler.

Every time, though, Tony was there to press it into his hands.

At least that blasted sense of inferiority fled after the first day. Steve was quietly and ridiculously thankful; the idiocy about Omega uselessness seemed so… so idiotic now. Like the thought had been planted in his head by someone else. The fact that he’d gone there immediately as a fear response needed some work, but he had plenty of time to think about it. The overwhelming silence was a distraction, in the same way that the incessant stimuli from his senses had been a distraction when he’d first received the serum. 

He was restless, waking early in the morning with the idea that he should be _doing_ something, and it occurred to him late that what he was missing was his morning run.

He’d never run before the serum. Obviously. But his bones craved it now; it felt like his very blood was jumping. If he hadn’t been faced with his changed body in the bathroom mirror when he went in to brush his teeth, he would have expected the old Steve.

The new-old Steve. The… something. He shook his head, too unsettled, too twitchy to think about it anymore. Whatever.

 _Steve Three-Point-Oh,_ Tony said one night over dinner, a fragile smile on his face like he wasn’t sure how he would be received. Steve surprised himself, and Tony too, with a laugh.

It felt good to laugh.

But it did nothing for the damned restlessness. One cool morning, he waited until Tony was in his workshop, and he went out for his run, choosing the path he liked second best but knew like the back of his… Like he knew Tony’s smell. He got exactly one minute and forty-seven seconds in before he was doubled over, sweat pouring onto the earth, watching the forest tip back and forth around him, gasping and choking and dully—because of the hypoxia—wondering what the point had been of leaving without his inhaler, to whom he was trying to prove what, whether he’d die here in this forest, and what would that prove to Tony except that Steve was missing half his brain cells in this body, or just that Steve was still the same stubborn idiot he’d mated himself to. 

Eventually he got enough air and the forest turned right side up again, and Steve wondered why he hadn’t thought to start with a walk instead.

When Tony figured it out, he came with Steve, even in the pitch dark of morning, yawning and muttering at Joshua’s _good for nothing grandchildren for sleeping in like lazy asses_ and tripping over tree roots more than Steve did, and that part wasn’t even an act.

Steve looked at him in the silver pre-dawn light and imagined touching him like he used to. Imagined Tony turning into it, into him, and touching back. Imagined their bodies meeting, imagined his size and Tony’s, how tall Tony was now compared to him, and abruptly stopped himself from imagining.

The wall was still there.

**

The blood tests were illuminating right when Steve most needed light. Coulson brought one of SHIELD’s doctors to the house, and she wasn’t like the ones who had gotten their hands on him right after the mission, but then, Steve would admit he was a little too deep into shock to see their attempts to help him as anything but perverse curiosity. 

Helen Cho was professional, and in possession of a good bedside manner. The second week, she told him the serum had not in fact deserted him as he’d feared, but had instead gone dormant. Whatever they shot him with was enough to smother it into inertness, but there was nothing that could outright drag it from his veins. It was working, albeit very slowly, but it was fixing things, piece by piece.

His asthma, for instance. He’d barely looked at his inhaler for the last two days. 

“It’s just a matter of time,” Dr. Cho told them. “But the bond is helping, too, with the asthma. Endorphins. Your body chemistry has returned to normal. Serum notwithstanding.” She winked at him, and Tony laughingly said he kind of liked being the one to bring Steve out of his panic for a change. Liked returning the favor.

She stopped short of telling them they should be nurturing the bond, doing things to make it stronger. The wall loomed, regardless, a hulking presence in the back of Steve’s mind, whenever he caught himself looking at Tony for longer than a smile. Maybe she sensed his inability to tackle it. Maybe that had been part of his bloodwork too, and now all of SHIELD’s medical division knew that Steve was… wasn’t…

Anyway, she didn’t say it, and Coulson didn’t say it, and neither did Tony. 

It wasn’t for lack of wanting Tony. Tony had been hard not to want when Steve first saw him, a young, thin Omega with a forced blank expression, vibrating with the urge to run, attack, something. Now, fully bonded to Tony and knowing every inch of him, not wanting him was impossible. Steve’s dreams changed, drew away from being unable to breathe because there was no oxygen, to being unable to breathe because Tony was just out of reach. _Just._ Steve felt like every part of him was stretching and stretching toward Tony, and Tony was right there, in dreams and in real life, right up against him in bed, curled around him on the couch, tucked into him beneath the shared blanket as they panned the telescope across the night skies. But something of Steve was holding back. Unwilling to take that final step. Whenever he tried, the panic crawled up his lungs, the inability to see what was coming, the _what if,_ and he instinctively tamped it down until it snuffed out.

**

Still. Things got better.

Tony called Jarvis. Steve stopped outside the kitchen one night, just in from the chilliness of the veranda to find their blanket, and overheard him. Not his words; he’d have to be right in Tony’s lap to make those out, these days. But his tone. It was definitely to Jarvis that he spoke. Tony didn’t speak to anyone else in that precise tone. Steve had once longed for Tony to speak to him in that tone, until he realized he had his own tone that Tony used with him, and it was filled with a lot of things that Steve… Well, Tony definitely didn’t speak to Jarvis _that_ way, put it like that. 

That would have been extremely weird.

He couldn’t hear more than murmuring. Long rambles followed by long silences. Steve leaned against the doorframe, aching to hear what Tony said. Half glad he couldn’t make it out. Something—the slowly returning serum, the bond, instinct—told him Tony was talking about him. Them. 

Steve shivered. Rubbed his hands up and down his arms, and turned resolutely away, back down the dark hallway to find that blanket.

**

 _“You sound the same.”_ Nat’s voice crackled a little over the connection. _“Just so you know.”_

“Thanks.”

 _“Wasn’t a compliment.”_ He could almost hear her shrug. _“Or an insult. Just a fact.”_

“A comfort?”

_“You know I don’t do comfort.”_

Steve smiled a little. “Okay.”

_“How’s extended leave treating you? Taken up yoga yet? Working on the house? Having sex all the time?”_

“Yeah,” Steve snorted. “Yeah, that’s what we’re doing.”

Her pause told him more than enough about what his voice had given away. But she didn’t press the topic. _“Yeah, well, enjoy yourself. Fury’s running Clint and me ragged. I keep telling him, I don’t do the heavy lifting. I do the sneaking, and Clint shoots things.”_

“But it doesn’t seem to matter?”

 _“But it doesn’t seem to matter.”_ Something shuffled on her end. He couldn’t make out what, but from the time and the time zone difference, he’d guess it was bedding. Didn’t sound quite right, though. _“So here I was sleeping. And this friend of mine called up—”_

“You were not sleeping. You were picking apart the mission plan one last time, looking for that hole.”

Another pause. _“I thought you didn’t hear so well these days.”_

“So that is paper I hear rustling, then?” 

She snorted. He smiled.

“I don’t hear so well,” he affirmed softly. “But I know my friends. You need to sleep.”

 _“I know.”_ She was quiet for a moment. _“Steve, what about something you don’t need to hear well to do?”_

“What do you mean?”

 _“I mean, Tony’s got his workshop. And you have your studio.”_

He looked down at the phone, as though he could stare at Natasha through it. When he lifted it back to his ear, she was mid-yawn.

_“Okay, human melatonin. I’m crashing now. Thanks for the sleep aid.”_

The call ended without either of them saying goodnight. That hadn’t changed either.

**

The studio had always been bigger than he needed. Steve could have done with the southwest corner in the living room where the daylight shone in through two large windows, or somewhere that would fit his easel, even just a chair that he could sit in, his back warmed by the fireplace while he sketched. 

Of course that was never going to happen on Tony’s watch. No, he only gave Steve the biggest room in the house: the vaulted sunroom on the north east side, where floor to ceiling windows caught the sun from dawn until noon, and then looked out over the ocean of trees that dipped down into the valley between two hills. Tony called it the conservatory in an exaggerated British accent, which was ridiculous, but it made Steve laugh, especially when Tony started going on about candlesticks and lead pipes. But really, all it held were a couple of long couches facing the windows, a bookshelf that stored Steve’s modest collection of art supplies, and the aforementioned easel. The floor was beautiful golden wood in wide planks, dotted with knots and eyes from the trees they had come from. Across it, and partially under the easel, Steve had laid a large canvas drop-cloth that remained in place unless he’d gotten it particularly messy. Then there was a stool, a few of Steve’s framed works on the walls, and a ceiling fan high above that turned silently. When the sun shone in, the entire room lit in a warm glow, perfect light for drawing, painting, or snoozing.

Really, there was a lot of unused space. His ‘workshop’, as it were, was so very different to Tony’s. The garage space was constantly cluttered with pieces of metal, hunks of wiring, and projects in various states of completion. Between missions and time with Tony, it had been a while since Steve had more than one canvas leaned against the walls at a time.

Today, he counted fourteen.

The first two were exercises in sharp, raw reds, deep black and muddied brown hashed in: pure rage that Steve hadn’t even known he felt until he was slashing paint at them like a madman in the middle of the night, his boxers and bare feet spattered, his motions biting but quiet, too quiet to wake Tony. Steve had felt even more out of sorts afterward, utterly exhausted, had turned the canvases immediately to the wall, crept to the shower to wash his feet and change, and had tiptoed back to crawl into bed at Tony’s side. He had no idea if Tony even knew he’d been up that night, and he hadn’t looked at the paintings since.

But he’d woken calmer than he could recall being in weeks, and he’d turned to charcoal and paper, his mind’s eye on the vast and sublime scenery outside: the hills scraping into mountains, the trees undulating away, the greens and yellows and the blue, blue sky. After the ice, he’d spent weeks just drawing the new skyline of NYC, remembering what it had been, cataloguing each change, noting the vast and tiny differences like the little twitches and fidgets of people, the ones that showed their real personalities, their uniqueness. He’d always felt better after drawing the world. Its enormity made him feel small, his troubles insignificant, and that was undeniably comforting.

He’d ended up with a canvas full of Tony. 

Or at least, half of him. The length of an arm, oil-spotted, stretching away from a bare shoulder, the curve of Tony’s spine, the taper of dark hair at his nape and the spikiness of sweat in his fringe. The tendon in the side of his neck. The strong line of a thigh and the naked hip that connected leg to body. The inward slope of knee and the fall of a foot into shadow, and the round tease of Tony’s buttocks fading into rough smudges of charcoal.

Steve had stared at it, fingers black to the knuckle, breathing hard and number to count the _thudthudthud_ of his heart. The wall loomed, _thudthudthudded_ at his back.

He put the canvas down, selected a new one, and did it again. And again.

Every time he tried to draw the world outside, Tony came out of the pencils and sticks of charcoal onto the paper, onto the canvas, each one a different side of him, a different facet, and each one making Steve ache, feel the wall as more of an injury than a blockade, a fence to keep out what harmed him. He still avoided. He still rammed up against the wall with every new canvas. God, he’d spent hours on one, until the sun was fully down, Steve squinting in the darkness of the room, unable to leave the sinews and wrinkles of Tony’s hands alone. 

Three days of it, of some sort of purging, of the wall looming, of something on the other side slamming and slamming against it until it began to shudder, until Steve was so hard, so aroused and so out of sorts, he turned off the lights and shut the door on his studio, and, heart hammering and hammering, stumbled outside to walk.

Tony had made to follow him, but stopped before leaving the house. He was waiting on the porch, two mugs in hand, when Steve returned.

“Okay?”

Steve nodded, took his mug—it was warm fruit cider with a faint kick of something alcoholic—and blew across it as the chilled breeze blew across them both. He waited for Tony to go on.

“What are you working on?” It came low, after several minutes, and unconcerned. Tony was looking out across the darkening landscape where the forest melted into nothingness.

 _A fucking wall between me and you._ For the first time, he wasn’t afraid of it, or relieved by it. For the first time, he hated it. 

Steve considered. “Have you looked at them?”

“Haven’t been in there since you got home.” Tony took a mouthful of his cider, still gazing outward. “Wasn’t sure if it would be intruding.”

“It’s not,” Steve said after another long moment. He shifted his feet on the porch’s boards. The cold was starting to catch up with him, in spite of the hot drink. He leaned closer to Tony, not quite touching. 

He wondered, for the first time, if it was he himself hammering at the other side of that wall. 

“You’re allowed to come in.” Something small and precious bloomed warm in his chest as he said it, even as his heartrate picked up a little, an echo of the race, the too much of earlier.

The smile Tony sent him was gentle, fleeting. He leaned the rest of the way, bumping Steve’s arm with his own, and stayed there. “Okay,” was all he said.

**

The next morning, Steve did paint the hills.

**

He painted. 

The room glowed icy yellow, then goldenrod, then coppery. Minutes, breaths, heartbeats slipped by; he blinked (once, he thought), and the light was suddenly warm and sweet as honey. His fingers hurt, his wrist was deliciously cramped, and the pain felt good. Driving. The darkness in the wall’s shadow had gone. There was no sign of the wall at all. He was a little afraid to look, and he was careful not to think of Tony, in case it really was still there. But the _weight_ of it was missing. The brush was a part of him, daubing and touching, stroking the canvas, and he could almost feel it as though instead of bristles it had a fleshy pad, nerve endings, stimulus receptors, as though the picture he formed out of pastels was reaching back. 

His skim thrummed. His blood raced. He breathed.

And became aware of Tony in the room, standing some ways behind him, in silent awe. He turned on the stool, opened his mouth, then turned back, the words completely lost, to gaze at the landscape taking shape before him, a view he’d never seen in his life but he knew it somehow, as he knew to inhale.

Tony came closer, steps slow as though he’d forgotten he could walk. The inches between them disappeared, and with each one gone, Steve’s insides grew and grew. There was nothing there to stop them.

Just a single word, hushed in the largeness of the room: “Steve.”

Another word came to him, materializing all at once as though it had always been there. _Life._

“It looks like a sunrise,” Tony murmured at Steve’s ear. Steve turned again on the stool, palette sinking into his lap, and found Tony inches away, eyes so deep and full. Steve swallowed, heard his own throat click. He looked at Tony, full on, and it was just Tony. Just Tony, breathing the same air.

“S’living,” he managed, the back of his throat burning as it all welled up, the words shaky and falling like a heartbeat, and before he could think, they were kissing, openmouthed and raw. The palette clattered to the floor as Steve turned fully, dragging Tony into his lap. Tony’s scent flared, and there was paint all over Steve’s hands, streaking Tony’s face and neck.

Tony tasted of coffee, sweet with sugar and the full fat cream he let himself have on weekends. He pushed into Steve’s hold and the stool tipped, threatened to fall. Steve shot a leg out, braced them just in time, and abruptly he was too hot in that airy room, too constrained, the swelling of his innards bursting to get out somehow, to twine around the person he’d been avoiding ever since the loss of the serum. Now he tripped and tumbled down over the rubble, the last of the barrier he’d been slowly bashing away at, and let himself fall. Tony gripped his face, firm, and plumbed his mouth. The kiss, so alien in his memories these past weeks, was immediately so familiar, so necessary to who they were, that Steve whimpered, wordless with the need to tell Tony how right it was. How much he needed it.

The stool was no place for this, for what he wanted. It would never hold up him, Tony, and this thing bursting to get out of him. He hitched Tony forward to lower them off it, bewildered by the quick stumble and drop, remembering the limits of his new body in a dismissive daze. Tony got them to the floor safely, and Steve felt coarse canvas under his palms, against his elbows as he came down on top of Tony. The palette rocked under Tony’s shoulder and Steve worked it free, tossed it away, hitting the rolling table that held his paints and knocking several bottles to the floor. Their loosened caps came off, splashing color everywhere. By then, Tony’s shirt was off, fumbled free by both their hands, and Steve’s tank top was a disaster in primary color. He struggled out of it, forgot about it in favor of returning to Tony’s mouth and Tony’s hands and Tony’s kisses. 

Light. There was so much light. He didn’t remember taking his pants off, or Tony’s, just that they were suddenly naked atop the canvas. Tony’s skin was awash in the glow from the windows, pale amber, late morning. Paint smeared between their bodies, swiping across Steve’s face and Tony’s chin. One of the windows was open, slid to the side to let the breeze in. Had Tony done that? Steve hadn’t heard it, hadn’t registered much of anything until Tony came up behind him. Now he could make out birdsong, sharp tweets, interrogative rises at the ends. Tony slung both legs around Steve’s hips, pressed up into the kiss, and the scent of it, of them, spilled all over Steve: Tony’s sweat and slick, his eager readiness.

He’d thought, when he pictured it—when he allowed himself before cramming it back behind the barrier—that this would be harder. But sliding into Tony was easy, instinctual, like something Steve was always meant to do. Tony’s body let him in without fanfare, without extra preparation or coaxing on either side. Without Steve having to convince himself, to straighten his head out as he’d feared he’d have to. There was nothing unnatural, nothing unwelcome about this. His body, and Tony’s, remembered, and the wall he’d built in the dark was nowhere, crumbled to dust at their feet. He tightened a hand high on Tony’s thigh. Lifted. Snugged him close. It was different, he wasn’t as strong, and it didn’t matter.

“C’mere,” Tony muttered between rapid breaths, as though Steve weren’t as close as he was going to get, except the way he pulled Steve down, tugged with hands and pressed with heels and squeezed with thighs, maybe he hadn’t been as close as all that, “come—yes,” and Steve sank deeper.

God on high. His thoughts were a flood, sensations gushing and pooling, sweeping everywhere. Tony’s words puddled into murmurs, helpless yearning sounds that rushed between presses of their mouths and mutual gasps for air. Steve stretched his back, pushing Tony’s arm up over his head, pressing it to the floor, fingers threaded through Tony’s and squeezing so hard that their knuckles went white. Tony shuddered on the first full thrust, back bowing off the canvas drop-cloth. “Alpha,” he hissed, and clenched his knees under Steve’s ribs. Rose to meet him. He smelled of sex and soap and paint. He smelled of Steve.

His body and the changes to it were gone, didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered in the face of this, of Tony in his arms again as fully as he was meant to be. Some part of Steve marveled at the fact that he’d shied away from it for so long, that it had felt so foreign. This was the opposite of foreign. This was home in every way, the final returning step he’d been hesitating over at the threshold. Tony’s free hand wove up and down his back, tangled in his hair, its track gone slick with sweat and paint. Fingernails dug in as Steve sucked at Tony’s throat, and Tony’s other hand clenched around Steve’s until their knuckles went white.

Steve knotted between one breath and the next, and the sound that came out of Tony then, the way he curled into Steve’s embrace, mouthed at his chin, clenched around him, was oxygen sharp into Steve’s lungs, an inferno over his nape. Tony’s chest was a kaleidoscope of greens and pinks and grays, color running with sweat, Steve’s dog tags smeared and spotted and sliding down over Tony’s shoulder, and right of center, Steve’s thumbprint in smudged white against the arc reactor’s pristine light. He bent, kissed the smooth cap and shut his eyes against the blur of blue. Tasted bitter acrylic. Tasted Tony’s sweat. He moved upward, pressed his lips to damp flesh and savored the fierce thump of Tony’s heart.

“Alpha.” Tony sounded broken, carved open. Shudder after shudder wracked Steve’s body, aftershocks of coming, foreshadows of an even greater arousal, the kind they only reached in the throes of intense, week-long, suppressant-free heat. When Steve looked up, Tony’s eyes were fixed on him, filled with light. “Steve.”

“I can’t lose you.” Steve’s voice cracked. “I think I’d—” _Die. Turn to ash. Blow away._ “I don’t know what I’d be.”

“You’re _mine,”_ Tony said, fierce and sudden, even as his hand tightened painfully around Steve’s arm. “My alpha. You’re not going anywhere.”

The kiss that followed was savage, and Steve, locked as he was inside his mate, felt as rough and untapped as if they were just starting. Tony moaned into his mouth, squirming against, around, him, pushing up into him, then pulled back with a rasp for air. Steve hauled in a breath of his own, and they panted there, noses brushing, Steve’s hair dripping sweat onto Tony’s brow, so close their eyelashes touched.

Tony stroked a paint-slick thumb over Steve’s cheek. “Neither am I, Steve. Never.”

It took him a moment as he thought back to what Tony had last said. And then he bent Tony back to the floor, in sunlight spilled like paint across a great canvas, and kissed him again.

~fin~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to coffeejunkii for betaing!!! *smooch*

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is the first thing I was able to really write since lockdown. I had a hard time getting at the creative side of myself for a while there. So I was very excited when this finally started coming out to play again. I can't thank sabrecmc enough for the beautiful AU of CN and OM. I feel like I could read that Steve forever.


End file.
